Workers in the field of integrated circuits are constantly striving to reduce the size of devices, in particular transistors.
As FET dimensions are scaled down, it becomes increasingly difficult to control short-channel effects by conventional means. Short-channel effects well known to those skilled in the art are the decrease in threshold voltage Vt, in short-channel devices, i.e. sub-0.1 micron, due to two-dimensional electrostatic charge sharing between the gate and the source/drain region.
An evolution beyond the standard single gate metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) is the double-gate MOSFET, in which the device channel is confined between top and bottom gate dielectric layers.
This structure, with a symmetrical gate structure, can be scaled to about half of the channel length as compared with a conventional single gate MOSFET structure. It is well known that a dual gate or double-gate MOSFET device has several advantages over conventional single gate MOSFET devices. Specifically, the advantages over conventional single gate counterparts include: a higher transconductance, and improved short-channel effects.
For instance, Monte Carlo simulation has been carried out on a 30 nm channel dual-gate MOSFET device and has shown that the dual gate device has a very high transconductance (2300 mS/nm) and fast switching speeds (1.1 ps for nMOSFET).
Moreover, improved short channel characteristics are obtained down to 20 nm channel length with no doping needed in the channel region. This circumvents the tunneling breakdown, dopant quantization, and dopant depletion problems associated with channel doping that are normally present with single gate MOSFET devices.
Currently, both vertical and horizontal gate structures are actively being pursued by many workers in the field. The horizontal gate structure has several advantages over the vertical structures due to the similarity of current state of the art CMOS devices. However, one major and formidable challenge of fabricating the double gate is aligning the bottom gate to the top gate.